No More Learning

And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different.
One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long
hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights
that the soul is competent to gain. ' We think in eternity, but we move
slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I
need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back
into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange
insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for
their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave
whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be.

And, though at present my friends may find it a hard thing to believe, it
is true none the less, that for them living in freedom and idleness and
comfort it is more easy to learn the lessons of humility than it is for
me, who begin the day by going down on my knees and washing the floor of
my cell. For prison life with its endless privations and restrictions
makes one rebellious. The most terrible thing about it is not that it
breaks one's heart--hearts are made to be broken--but that it turns one's
heart to stone. One sometimes feels that it is only with a front of
brass and a lip of scorn that one can get through the day at all. And he
who is in a state of rebellion cannot receive grace, to use the phrase of
which the Church is so fond--so rightly fond, I dare say--for in life as
in art the mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the soul, and
shuts out the airs of heaven. Yet I must learn these lessons here, if I
am to learn them anywhere, and must be filled with joy if my feet are on
the right road and my face set towards 'the gate which is called
beautiful,' though I may fall many times in the mire and often in the
mist go astray.

This New Life, as through my love of Dante I like sometimes to call it,
is of course no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by means of
development, and evolution, of my former life. I remember when I was at
Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen's
narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my
degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden
of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion
in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake
was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to
me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its
shadow and its gloom.
Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair,
suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain,
remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-
abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the
anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink
puts gall:--all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had
determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them in
turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at
all.

I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it
to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no
pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup
of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived
on honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong
because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half
of the garden had its secrets for me also. Of course all this is
foreshadowed and prefigured in my books. Some of it is in _The Happy
Prince_, some of it in _The Young King_, notably in the passage where the
bishop says to the kneeling boy, 'Is not He who made misery wiser than
thou art'? a phrase which when I wrote it seemed to me little more than a
phrase; a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of doom that like a
purple thread runs through the texture of _Dorian Gray_; in _The Critic
as Artist_ it is set forth in many colours; in _The Soul of Man_ it is
written down, and in letters too easy to read; it is one of the refrains
whose recurring _motifs_ make _Salome_ so like a piece of music and bind
it together as a ballad; in the prose poem of the man who from the bronze
of the image of the 'Pleasure that liveth for a moment' has to make the
image of the 'Sorrow that abideth for ever' it is incarnate. It could
not have been otherwise. At every single moment of one's life one is
what one is going to be no less than what one has been.